Meerkat for iOS lets you live stream video to your Twitter followers
Amanda Connolly / The Next Web :
Context & Ripple Effects
Meerkat arrived as a weekend project, not a funded product — The Wall Street Journal's account of the side project that took off frames just how accidental this launch was. What it did was wire live video directly into Twitter's follower graph: anyone with an iOS device could broadcast and reach their existing audience instantly, with no new network to build.
The speed of what followed explains why it matters. Within weeks Meerkat added in-stream follows and friend-based discovery ([[a:827739]]), then pushed an Android app out ahead of Twitter's own Periscope. A third-party app was briefly competing with the platform it depended on — and winning races against it.
First-order effects
- Twitter users gain instant livestreaming into their existing follower graph from day one, while Periscope — Twitter's in-house answer — suddenly has an independent competitor operating on Twitter's own distribution.
Second-order effects
- Meerkat's whole business sits on infrastructure it doesn't control: Twitter owns both the social graph Meerkat broadcasts to and the rival product (Periscope) chasing the same behavior, giving the platform every lever in the relationship.
Third-order effects
- The endgame is already visible in the corpus: within a year Meerkat abandoned livestreaming entirely to chase a video social network ([[a:865942]]), a cautionary pattern suggesting standalone apps built atop another company's graph struggle to survive once the platform owner ships the same feature natively.
The trend: Live-video apps that rent their audience from an incumbent social graph are structurally fragile, and the Meerkat-Periscope collision became the template case for platforms absorbing the features built on top of them.